IPv6 Support for Amazon S3 | Hacker News Reader

IPv6 Support for Amazon S3

aws.amazon.com

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From the documentation [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ipv6-access.h...]:

"Before EC2 (VPC) supports IPv6, we recommend that you continue using the standard IPv4-only endpoints from EC2"

In other words, IPv6 in VPC is coming.

Yup, same comment in the YouTube[1] video at :33.

1. https://youtu.be/sMvrx8exfek

>Now Available – IPv6 Support for Amazon S3

Yay!

>S3 Feature Support – IPv6 support is available for all S3 features with the exception of Website Hosting

Oh.

Oh what the hell. What use is it then?

Image hosting.

But not IPv6 image hosting.

web site hosting is a distinct feature from file serving.

Yea, it should read "IPv6 available ... for one use case .. and not the ten other ones."

Great to finally see AWS start moving to IPv6! I'm sure just getting S3 to support it was a massive effort on the backend infrastructure (in all their data centers around the world - except for China apparently) and they've going to spend a lot of time looking at the new traffic and tweaking their network.

I don't forsee just S3 access having a huge impact outside of Amazon though, since IPv6 has the biggest impact on end-users, and I presume most of those are hitting CloudFront, ELB or EC2 endpoints.

Here's hoping CloudFront is next!

Why is this being supported on an entirely new endpoint instead of added to the existing ones?

It's kind of sucky, but there are a couple of good reasons for it:

1. Some people have broken IPv6 connectivity. Their OS will prefer the IPv6 address and won't fall back to the IPv4 address until after a lengthy timeout.

2. People might have IP address restrictions in place that currently only have IPv4 addresses whitelisted. If suddenly they started using IPv6 addresses they'd be blocked and their applications would break.

(1) is the user's OS responsibility. All modern OS systems have a complex system in place already for this (using ICMP preflighting and DNS resolution timing checks and simultaneous v4/v6 connections, among other things). We're already in a world were networks have to be IPv6-first or IPv6-only (mobile networks are IPv6-first and soon likely to be IPv6-only; several large US cable ISPs have moved or are moving to IPv6-first/IPv6-only; etc), at least in the consumer world.

I agree, and furthermore the success of World IPv6 Day in 2011 showed that such breakage isn't all that common in the wild.

The second point is still a real concern though.

> (1) is the user's OS responsibility.

I don't care whose "responsibility" it is: if it costs my company a customer and it is something that can be fixed on my end with a seemingly simple workaround, it is something that I should fix, and I am glad that Amazon is thinking this through, particularly if it breaks an existing user when they roll out the upgrade. I mean: imagine if 0.1% of Netflix customers woke up today and the only immediate recourse Netflix has when they start being flooded with complaints is "you will need to upgrade your OS: we can no longer support whatever slightly older version you have.

Might be to avoid problems with client libraries, firewalls, ... that don't react properly to it? E.g. if something tries to use IPv6 behind a firewall that blocks it and doesn't fall back to IPv4?

Backward compatibility. If you whitelist in access rules some IPv4 IPs, than adding IPv6 support to same endpoint may give 403 for some clients which try IPv6 first.

I hope the documentation deprecates usage of the old endpoints / strongly encourages use of the dual-stack ones.

Finally! Some movement on IPv6. Long overdue, but it's just nice they're taking care of it.

Python 3 on Lambda too, maybe? Or is that wishful thinking?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12235314

About f*cking time. Google - what are you going to do about it? ;)

Lest we forget:

https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai...

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=672099

If your application requires a specific protocol version, Google also provides IPv4-only, IPv6-only and dual-stack targets unaffected by the list of DNS resolvers above. The available CNAME targets are:

ghs.googlehosted.com: Automatic (default) ghs4.googlehosted.com: IPv4 only ghs6.googlehosted.com: IPv6 only ghs46.googlehosted.com: IPv4 and IPv6

Google actually supports IPv6 on Cloud Storage, which is their equivalent to S3. Neither Google or Amazon support it on VM instances yet.

I'll note that Azure fully supports IPv6 because it was obvious 10 years ago that building a cloud host without it was a dumb idea. Why it is taking AWS and Google so long I have no idea.

What? The Azure FAQ says:

"The foundational work to enable IPv6 in the Azure environment is well underway. However, we are unable to share a date when IPv6 support will be generally available at this time."

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/faq/

Does their website hosting thing support it yet? I currently have a site set up as:

BUCKET.COM.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Is there a dual stack version of that?

No, S3 website hosting still doesn't support IPv6.

Do you know why that is?

Nope, just relaying what the documentation says.

LOL, so essentially what's the benefit of it? So you can only call S3 API over v6?

What about HTTP2

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2460 "December 1998"

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